Gender profile of the Zimbabwe Election Process

Eunice Mafundikwa

The recent elections in Zimbabwe clearly exposed the fallacy of having a free and fair election in a patriarchal society. Women, although assumed to be equal citizens, were severely limited in the manner in which they engaged with the electoral process by a plethora of developments including new laws governing the electoral process.

The freeness and fairness of an election has been given a patriarchal definition, which clearly calls for further interrogation. Elections are indeed a gendered process. So the general nature of politics in patriarchal societies gives women fewer choices irrespective of party affiliations. What choice does a woman have if the head of the household holds a different political view from hers?

Thousands of men and women were brutalised by a state sponsored campaign of terror which left many raped and tortured, more than 150 people dead, and over 70,000 displaced in what has been dubbed Zimbabwe's bloodiest election since independence in 1980.

Thousands of women were silent and invisible victims of an orchestrated campaign of terror and political violence that swept the country over the last two years and continues to date. Women have been battered, have watched as their husbands, partners and children being brutalised and tortured, their property destroyed or been uprooted from their homes.

The perpetrators of these crimes have invariably been youth militia and the so-called war veterans sanctioned by the government. Cultural taboos around the issue of rape have silenced the women, many of whom will never tell their stories. The impact of this sexual violence will live with these women forever, especially given the high levels of HIV/AIDS where one in four Zimbabweans is living with the virus.

While there have been generalised reports on the effects of political violence on citizens, nothing has been properly documented about its effect on the country's female population. As such, the correct figures of how many women were sexually abused in the name of politics will forever remain a secret.

"Nobody even stopped to wonder what this means for the women… So many women have lost breadwinners to political violence. Some women who were raped have not even bothered to report because rape brings shame and one risks losing a husband once they come out in the open about being raped," said an official from Amani Trust, a local NGO offering counselling, shelter and legal assistance to victims of torture and organised violence.

The high intensity of intolerance, intimidation and violence, effected mainly on opposition supporters, depleted political space for the women's meaningful participation. This manifested itself in the relegation of women to mere spectators or campaign cheerleaders. Even more serious was the killing of the debate on women's participation in politics and equity which became non critical subjects. Gender issues and women's concerns were not central to electoral issues and none of the political parties "spoke to women" as a constituency.

For instance, the thrust of the Zanu PF presidential campaign centered on land redistribution and yet the current land distribution programme has in no way enhanced women's access and control of the land although the party is aware that over 60 percent of Zimbabwean women live on working the land.

"The violation of women in this campaign has been justified by the need to redress imbalances of the past. Women have doubly suffered from this campaign. They have not gained access or control of land; instead they have borne the brunt of the violence associated with the campaign," said the Zimbabwe Women's Coalition, an umbrella body of individual Zimbabwean women and women's non-governmental organisations.

In a bid to use every possible means to maintain a grip on power, the government rushed through parliament, new laws governing the election. The extremely opaque laws in a strong sense erased all the gains women seemed to have made in relation to protection of their rights over the last 20 years, particularly their right to vote.

Under the new Zimbabwe Citizenship Act, women were dispossessed of their right to vote by the laborious and expensive process of renouncing either their foreign citizenship or their parent's foreign citizenship. Most women affected by the new law were in the commercial farming areas, which had become war veteran's war zones and were therefore inaccessible. Generally women in this category plus women in the rural areas had neither access to information nor resources to squarely face the demands of the new law.
Another new law, the General Laws Amendment Act defined new criteria for voter registration by demanding a lodger's card or proof of residence from urban dwellers. Given the patriarchal nature of the Zimbabwean society most married women did not have such proof because rent cards, electricity bills, water bills and so forth, contained their husband's name. A substantial amount of women fell into this category and therefore could not register to vote.

The automatic switch of citizenship to that of one's husband, a practice which the Registry Office did without consultation with persons concerned, also meant that some women arrived at voter registration centres with "incorrect" documents and could therefore not register to vote. The registry officers assumed that upon marriage a woman assumes her husband's citizenship.

Because women are far less politically informed and more vulnerable to threat, reports of demands of political party cards as a prerequisite to voter registration forced some women to stay away.

Clearly this showed that the voter registration process was discriminatory, and that voter registration facilities were not accessible to both men and women. A breakdown of how many women were turned away on voting days was not available.

The intimidatory tactics of the ruling Zanu PF complimented by the new laws, made orthodox electioneering virtually impossible in most parts of the country. Numerous cases of brutalisation of opposition supporters who dared to campaign publicly are well documented.

To get around this problem women from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change found a creative way of escaping the watchful eye of the ruling party thugs and launched a "chitter-chatter campaign", where women educated each other on the elections during informal meetings.

"Women are going to be the most effective campaigners in this election," said Lucia Matibenga, the chairman of the MDC's women's alliance, "because they're not as visible. "They can slip into houses and arrange meetings discreetly. Men like the big rally approach. But women generally prefer to chat together about issues that will affect our families. With Mugabe's new laws we have to campaign the women's way or not at all." In the post election era, new legislation, the Public Order and Security Act, now makes it an offence for women to meet in their social groups without police clearance.

Voter education, which since independence was largely conducted by NGOs, churches and other civic bodies, had become an exclusive task of the Electoral Supervisory Commission. The severely under resourced ESC had not gone out to the people to explain the new electoral and citizenship laws but the bits and pieces of information generated by this office was too little, too late and did not address the specific needs of women.

The resultant absence of voter education in highly illiterate rural areas meant easy manipulation of voters through a denial of civic and voter education. While technically one's vote is a secret, the marshalling of people to polling stations by either the headmen or other political activists meant the people were not exactly exercising their right to vote in secrecy. This was more so the case for those women who needed assistance in the polling booths.

"We observed that the majority of the people assisted to vote were women, due to illiteracy. This jeopardised the essence of a secret ballot, and may have affected the outcome of the process, yet voter education would have helped them to practise their right in secret," noted the World Council of Churches observer mission to the Zimbabwe presidential elections.

Although the Constitution of Zimbabwe guarantees the right to express political opinion, the highly charged atmosphere of political violence forced many to opt to remain silent. An expression of one's political opinion became risky business. The mass media did not carry voices of the opposition and down played experiences of women from both camps because they are political non-entities.

On the actual days of polling, authorities successfully frustrated women voters by reducing the number of polling stations in urban areas. This meant that many women who shoulder the burden of domestic, family and other responsibilities were forced to abandon the long queues to perform these duties.

Given the gender blindness of the election process in Zimbabwe, the Women's Coalition declared that; "The elections were conducted in an unsafe, unfair and unacceptable environment for the women of this country." The coalition has joined the several other local and international bodies that have rejected Robert Mugabe's victory.

References

1 Gender and Zimbabwe Presidential Elections by Women in Parliament Support Unit
2 Women's Coalition Press Statement - April 2002

Vol, 10 July 2002

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